15 June 1889

Barcelona
From: Jose Rizal
To: Vicente Barrantes

Rizal points out Barrantes’ glaring errors and ignorance of Philippine History.

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Barcelona, 15 June 1889

MOST EXCELLENT SIR,

They say that the most sensible man has to commit a folly at least while he lives on earth. I, Most Excellent Sir, who neither boast of being sensible nor even most excellent, can permit myself to commit one (I have already so many on my conscience) by addressing to you the following lines. May God and honorable men forgive me for it!

Your Excellency published last year four articles on “The Tagalog Theater” in numbers 259, 260, 361, and 362 of La Ilustracion Artistica of Barcelona. Although it is only now that I have come to learn of them, accept nevertheless my felicitation, for applause and praises, like money, gifts, and other exactions, never come late, as Your Excellency knows very well. And this is not the occasion to say that asno muerto la cebada al rabo,[1] because while Your Excellency lives, neither I nor anybody can apply to you the proverb, much less take you for a dead ass.

I have read the articles from head to tail (not of the dead ass) and I am very much pleased to find Your Excellency up-to- date in many things. I am exceedingly delighted to note the good opinion that Your Excellency has of yourself and the poor one that you have of others, of us, above all, the incompetent and entirely inept Tagalogs, because personal satisfaction is a proof of a clean conscience and contempt of others is self-mastery, two things that I rejoice at finding in your majestic and intelligent personality.

For the same reason I fail to explain to myself the dissatisfaction of the other Tagalogs who had been able to read your articles. Some say that the least Your Excellency occupies itself with is the Tagalog theater, which Your Excellency could discover whether good or bad, as it exists, and that instead of doing that, Your Excellency breaks loose against the Indios, against the Spanish Filipinos, against Philippine society, mistaking or taking many effects for causes and many causes for effects. To this I reply that they are not right and yet they are my compatriots. Your Excellency in fact does not take up the Tagalog theater, but indeed the theater and the Tagalogs. It is not necessary for a civil governor or chief of the civil administration to fulfill religiously his duties; it is enough if he misgoverns or administers the country badly and his own interests well and afterwards be uncivil and other things besides. Your Excellency and I are agreed that names are immaterial, at least in the Philippines, and in the case of titles, all resemble insecticide powder or hair tonic — whether or not they kill fleas, whether they make the hair grow or fall, this is beside the point; the question is to make money. So then, that Your Excellency does not describe the Tagalog theater but instead hurls menacing words to the Tagalogs has nothing special. Would that Your Excellency had not occupied itself with any other thing in your life, at least while you were holding high positions in the Philippines!

Others note that Your Excellency must be loaded with bile and must have some great physical or moral incongruity to have so acrid a character as you have. To this I reply that each one has what he has and as no one has created himself, at least physically, he does wrong in acquiring for that reason a bad temper and an evil heart. What is censurable is that one is not only satisfied with his own but covets besides another’s. It is another’s whatever is the property of others, so long as by this word “others” is not understood either Indios or Tagalogs, or inhabitants of the Philippines. Your Excellency and I are agreed that such beings are creatures neither divine nor human.

Others, and this is the most serious, say Your Excellency neither knows the history of the Philippines nor understands Chinese and Japanese theaters and even less the Filipino which you pretend to treat, and that you have written these articles to display certain dazzling knowledge and extol yourself and to denigrate and humble those unfortunate people, assuage your conscience and satisfy a certain cry or public opinion, as if to answer: One does not rob the brute, one who is not a man should not be treated such. Homo homini ignoto lupus est,[2] said the Latins, but the proverb could not be applied because the Filipinos were not ignoti to Your Excellency. The question is to make them non homines in order to be able to be lupus.

As Your Excellency can expect, I, who am such a partisan of yours, had also to defend you against other accusations. For the present they say that Your Excellency from the very beginning slips on an historical question and they cite me this: “At the moment when Miguel Legazpi and Fr. Urdaneta established on the banks of the Pasig a control more artificial [than] stable.” (Chap. l, paragraph l.) The stupid Tagalogs are surprised that Fr. Urdaneta had been in Manila when history books say that he was sent from Cebu to Mexico, where he died, before Legazpi came to Luzon. These Tagalog brutes add that the first time Urdaneta came in the Villalobos expedition neither did he decry from afar the coasts of Luzon, and then at the time he was not a friar but a soldier, spending almost all his time fighting in the Moluccas against the Portuguese. What does Your Excellency say of the infamy of these ignorant Indios who pretend that history is more correct than Your Excellency? One has to be a Tagalog brute, Most Excellent Sir, in order to harbor such a pretension. It is enough that Your Excellency, a man of superior race, say so for me to believe it against all historical citations, be they true or not. The point is that it be said by one belonging to the race of demigods. And even supposing that they were right, what? Could not Your Excellency undo the past and through the art of enchantment make Fr. Urdaneta go to Manila, in spite of whatever they may say? Don’t we hear of the ubiquity of St. Alphonse of Liguria and of other monks and saints? What God could do cannot the divine person of Your Excellency accomplish in a country of savages? Well, I know so many things that Your Excellency did that surely neither God nor saint will dare or can do!

Some who are more fastidious, without leaving chapter l, paragraph 1, criticize Your Excellency’s phrase which says: “As the history of the Archipelago properly begins with our conquest in the last years of the XVI century . . .” These fastidious people cannot accept that the year 1521 when Magellan came for the first time, be taken by Your Excellency as the last years of the century, that is, they cannot agree that the beginning is the end. And the inepts say: “Granting for argument’s sake that the history of a country begins for another from the day when he has knowledge of it, undoubtedly the history of the Philippines ought to begin for Spain in the year 1521 when Pigafetta wrote his Primo viaggio intorno al mondo in which he gives very detailed information about the various usages and customs in the Philippines and when Elcano and others on their return to Spain gave information about the country. But we have still older data, manuscripts of the XIV century about the Philippines, and history has to fall back several centuries still. If Mr. Barrantes does not know more than what he knows, he should write with less presumption.”

To this I reply with my Achilles argument: It is enough that Your Excellency, a man of superior race, says it for me to believe it against all historical citations, be they true or not. The “monkeys” have nothing or ought not to reply! Speaking of monkeys, Le Matin of the 26 May 1889 contains a statement to prove the madness of Baron Raymond de Seilliere and his pretensions: “Compared with me,” he said, “all men are monkeys. I know everything without having studied anything.” But this does not apply to Your Excellency, however much resemblance one may like to see!

Against all future observations, Your Excellency, as a man of superior race, had already written at the end of the famous chapter 19 paragraph l, the following: “Such a study ought not either to be undertaken with hopes of increasing knowledge, but it is done because of the eagerness that afflicts modern men to investigate everything, though they are certain to be lost in a vacuum!”

Above all “to be lost in a vacuum,” as it happened to Your Excellency! This is a proof of the semi-divinity of Your Excellency. Only that after such a confession Your Excellency, in my humble opinion, ought to have thrown away your pen, because inter nos to be a nuisance in four chapters, to write seventy and more paragraphs, longer than the first and with more breaks and gaps, is truly to be unkind to the readers and above all to be more unkind to me, your devoted defender.

Where do I get so many arguments? If your divinity will not help me, I shall have to give up my persistence. I concede, however, that if Your Excellency wanted to vent your anger and ill-humor on readers and defenders, you did very well in writing so many paragraphs, because you have attained your purpose. I tell you sotto voce. “That Your Excellency has caused all of us to burst!”

But on with my task.

Chapter l, paragraph 2. They say, to my indignation, that Your Excellency, despite your fumes and abundant bile, has moments of excessive candor. And to prove their assertion, they reproduce what Your Excellency writes at the beginning of paragraph 2: “From the combined documents and memoirs that the conquerors left us, it can be clearly inferred that they gave slight value to the land and its people, the Adelantado himself saying in his letter to the commander of the Portuguese navy in the Moluccas, Gonzalo Pereira, in the first days of his entry in Cebu, that ‘they are not of such high quality that will invite the covetousness of anybody’.” And they believe that Your Excellency is more innocent than the very same Portuguese, believing literally the astute words of the great Legazpi! Of such little value were the people and the land that Legazpi concluded with the first a treaty of defensive and offensive alliance, the Spanish soldiers fighting under the command of the Indio Tupas, his men helping them in their expedition to Manila, having taken from two provinces in one year alone 109,500 pesos in gold. I say that Your Excellency ought not to disregard this and other things as neither did the Portuguese commander that for the sake of this “wretched” country had a scuffle with the men of Legazpi after long diplomatic pourparlers; but the point is to demonstrate that the country and its inhabitants were or are not worth a straw and for that all means are proper, even silly ones.

Reading the rest of the paragraph, they deduce that Your Excellency has not read the historians who say that the Filipinos had many industries before the arrival of the Spaniards and that they lost them little by little since they took possession of the country for reasons very sad and irritating to say. And they cite Morga, Colin, Chirino, and Gaspar de San Agustin himself, so anti-Indio as Your Excellency. Dr. Hans Meyer, who is no Indiophile, expresses the same opinion, seeing how diligent and industrialized still are the independent and non-Christian Filipinos, and he expresses the fear that they may become as lazy as the others once they are converted. Frankly, Most Excellent Sir, I have no answer to this except the usual one. It is enough that Your Excellency, a man of superior race, says it, etc. God alone is God and Barrantes, of superior race, is his prophet.

I fear that I may lack answers to the seventy or so paragraphs that remain in which you let loose, my torment and the joy of the stupid Tagalogs, so many monumental errors, manifest so much ignorance, and show yourself so vulgar in your knowledge that less could not be asked from the most ignorant member of Spanish society in Manila, upon whom you look down with so much contempt! Internos, Your Excellency does not know a single thing about Filipino writing, nor have you studied it. Your Excellency does not know that weapons and copper objects have been found in the Philippines belonging to this age; Your Excellency knows nothing about the origin of the Tagalogs and still you believe that their writing is that of the Malays! Like the ignorant populace who do not go deep into anything or read anything carefully but are satisfied with four axioms that they are told, Your Excellency believes that the civilization of China and Japan had exerted a great influence on the Philippines before the coming of the Spaniards. The Chinese came to the Islands only as mere traders but without ever leaving their crafts, without going into the interior, and without being able even to establish themselves as they had done since the Spaniards arrived. They had no political influence whatsoever. And as to the Japanese, though there are signs and traditions of Japanese origin that make us believe that some of them had come to the Philippines, nevertheless neither did they have political influence in the Philippines before the arrival of the Spaniards. But, what is the use of telling Your Excellency these things, seeing that you will not understand or believe them, because you have neither the background nor have you done any preliminary studies? Your Excellency says “…The Portuguese and Chinese Legazpi found were brought in and others were already established in the country.” This is reading history in your own way. What Legazpi found were the depredations and barbarous cruelties committed in the Bisayan group of islands by the Portuguese who passed themselves for Spaniards and hastily returned to the Moluccas in order to arouse the hatred of the Indios against the Spaniards; and about the Chinese, on account of a typhoon, a vessel of theirs was seized by the inhabitants of Mindoro. Legazpi freed it and invited the Chinese to increase their trade, promising them protection.

“As to ceramics and clothes, some curious objects that have been found reveal Chinese or Japanese origin.” Neither is this accurate, for the celebrated ancient jars that Morga already talked about and about which Jagor writes a fine chapter, though they are much appreciate by the Chinese or Japanese, are not however made by them.

I give up then defending Your Excellency as to the remainder, because I see that the effort is far above my ability. Your Excellency speaks of the Chinese and Japanese theaters and I note that neither have you studied them nor know them so well as the Tagalog. Why has not Your Excellency gone out with an interpreter to study these dramatic performances once and several times, as various inepts and lazy Filipinos have done, among them the “monkey” who writes this, in the theaters of China and Japan? Your Excellency would say that the demigodliness of your race did not permit you to make such studies and you contented yourself with what some travelers said. In this I grant that you are right, but I remind you that the demigods never talked to us about the Chinese and Japanese theaters, and in this regard Your Excellency set a bad precedent.

But why the inept Tagalogs do not reflect or have in their social life anything of the Japanese or Chinese theater (which could not get to the Philippines before the Spaniards, for Japanese drama never touched the Archipelago); why the Tagalogs do not preserve anything of what they have seen, Your Excellency deduces they lack the spirit of assimilation. Frankly I am annihilated. Those who disrespectfully laugh at you argue: Does the Spanish race by chance lack the spirit of assimilation for the mere fact that its literary history in the first centuries of the Carthaginian occupation does not record remains of Greek grammar? Should it be deduced from this that the Spaniards are inept? The Tagalogs lack the spirit of assimilation. Well, do not Your Excellency and others say that the Indios for their facility in “imitating” things are some “monkeys” Did they not assimilate easily as Your Excellency recounts later Spanish dramatics, in spite of its little vigor, poor actors, and worse plays? What would you answer us if we would put this question to you: Your Excellency, suppose that a Roman proconsul, after exploiting and robbing the government and the Spaniards, then a Roman colony, upon his return to Italy, in order to escape the censure and the complaints of the exploited, should go about proclaiming that the Spaniards are brutes, inepts, not men, because they neither had writing, nor did they know how to adopt Greek, Phoenician, and Carthaginian literature, nor did they have tragedies or comedies, nor could they even imitate, even badly, the plays that Eunius, Plautus, and Terence wrote? Would the proconsul be right then to insult an entire people and justify his depredations?

To these gentlemen I say, Most Excellent Sir, nego paritatem.[3] Your Excellency has nothing of the Roman proconsul, and if we, like the Spaniards of that time, do not reflect foreign dramaturgy, on the other hand we had our own writing, more or less imperfect, but writing after all, that we used, which neither the Celts nor the Gauls nor the Iberians nor even the Celtiberians possessed. Great proof that we are inept and stupid and incapable of civilization! Your Excellency itself says that the first theatrical representation that could be discovered in Spain, as the child of the new civilization, though it was in Provencal, dates from the XIl century, that is, fourteen centuries after the golden age of Latin drama (which must have passed through Spain, for the Romans carried their customs, laws, language, and civilization everywhere, evidence of it being the ruins and mementoes found in Spain) and sixteen centuries after the era of Euripides and Aristophanes! And how many centuries ago did Spain bring her dramaturgy to the Philippines? Does not Your Excellency say, though inaccurately, that the first theatrical representation was in the time of Corcuera, 5 July 1637? And Your Excellency wants the stupid and inept Tagalogs [to] achieve in one century what the superior and intelligent Europeans could not accomplish in fourteen centuries? And nevertheless, Your Excellency says that in 1750 the rough Tagalogs already performed in a comedy as actors. What European nation, after one century of Roman rule — why do I say after a century, after twelve centuries — has translated into national verses the Aeneid, some comedy of Plautus, or any other Latin or Greek play, as Your Excellency claim the Tagalogs and other Filipinos did with the Pasion and various books and comedies? Your Excellency says that the Pasion was translated into the principal dialects of the country in the XVII century, that is, a century after, but you have not read what Colin says on page 54: “They are very fond of writing and reading. Hardly was there a man, or less a woman, who did not know it and use it even in devotional matters — those who are already Christians. From the sermons they hear, the stories, lives of the saints, and prayers, they compose religious poems, for there are such accomplished poets among them who translate with elegance into their language any Spanish comedy. They use many booklets and devotional books in their own tongue and written by their own hand. This is affirmed in the manuscript history of Fr. Pedro Chirino to whom was entrusted in 1609 the examination of these books by the Provisor and Vicar General of this Archbishopric.” This is what the Spanish Jesuit Colin says who spent many years in the Philippines and wrote her history about 1640 or so. We do not want to cite further, because it would be throwing it away. There are some which are so precious that they are truly pearls. All this indicates that the Filipinos are a people that cannot be civilized, and Your Excellency is of superior race.

Everything that Your Excellency says about the corridos[4] could be true, but the point is that Your Excellency does not know which are the works that the Tagalogs call corridos. The Tagalogs distinguish them from the awit, a matter that Your Excellency need not know either. The purpose is to slander a people and in order to slander them, knowledge is unnecessary.

What you say about the Pasion is interesting, but Your Excellency could have told us from what original work was translated the version so much in vogue among the Filipinos, and then prove it. The fact that other similar or analogous works are found in other languages, does not mean to say that the later ones are translations of the former. Otherwise, three Gospels would be translations of that of St. Matthews, and so of other works.

Your Excellency says: “Although there is but one step from the recitative and vocal music to stage representation, it seems unquestionable that the Pasion did not lead to it among the Indios. . .’’, and afterwards he weakens on this principle with insulting reflections on the whole morality of a people. Certainly Your Excellency could have saved the succeeding paragraphs if you had studied deeply the matter. Yes, Most Excellent Sir, there are dramatic scenes in the Pasion; all the Tagalogs would tell you so. When I was a child I saw the temptation on the mountain and the burial scenes represented on the stage in private houses.[5] But what happens to Your Excellency with regard to this is the same as with the Filipino comedies — you have not seen them, therefore there are none, therefore the stupid Tagalogs ought to be insulted.

We are going to give more careful attention to Filipino art and Philippine literature when more serene days shine. Then we shall say which stage representation was purely indigenous, which was exotic, brought by the Spaniards, which was the product of this mixture, which were the most notable works, etc. In the meantime, Your Excellency may please excuse me if I do not now reveal these glories or little manifestations of the spirit of my country. Frankly, I do not want to see mentioned the name of your Excellency in the history of the arts of my native land. However poor and crude they might be, however infantile, ridiculous, and puny Your Excellency may hold them, nevertheless they preserve for me much poetry and a certain aureole of purity that Your Excellency could not understand. The first songs, the first farces, the first drama, that saw in my childhood and which lasted three nights, leaving an indelible remembrance in my mind, in spite of their crudity and absurdity, were in Tagalog. They are, Most Excellent Sir, like an intimate festival of a family, of a poor family. The name of Your Excellency which is of superior race would profane it and take away all its charm.

And we shall try to finish quickly.

I shall leave aside many observations in your articles. I will overlook that of “the Malays of Colombo and Ceylon” that Your Excellency states in chapter III, paragraph 3. I believe that Your Excellency does not refer to the Indians of Caucasian race, inhabitants of Ceylon, but to some other Malay who had accidentally gone there, unless Your Excellency wants to alter ethnography. Of course I know that being of superior race, you can do anything. In that case, you could have said also “the Malays of Madrid and Spain, or of London and England, of Paris and France,” because it seems that for Your Excellency the capital of a country does not belong to her. But Your Excellency, being of superior race, can make the Singhalese Malays and of Colombo, capital of Ceylon, whatever you may want or fancy. They are all toadeaters and of dark color. Your Excellency will say that at night all cats are drab; therefore all those of dark color are Malays. The chulos (rogues) of Madrid call them Chinese, however. Take note, Your Excellency, your fellow countrymen, the chulos.

And skipping all, except the last one, for which not even I, your ardent defender, can forgive you, the conclusion, in which you say: “ . . . because the carillo[6] of Magdalena Street had dared to stage Don Juan Tenorio, a play that was in fashion among perverted people because a native actor of the Filipino theater was wont to behead him frequently. . .’’ I say that I cannot forgive Your Excellency for it and I repeat it, in exchange for your fury and your antipathies, in exchange for the loss of all my good services and my work . . . I cannot forgive you, no, Most Excellent Sir, I cannot permit that Your Excellency convert into “a native actor of the Filipino theater” that actor of superior race, of the same race as Your Excellency. How? Your Excellency lowering thus a demigod to the most unworthy category of a native, only because he did not play well his role? Look out, Your Excellency, if that system is generalized, the Filipinos are going to be more numerous than the Chinese, I say, they are going to dominate the world, and perhaps, perhaps I may have for compatriots many Most Excellent Sirs and other titles besides, which would be a calamity. Your Excellency, the whole Manila public, all that society that Your Excellency says is apathetic and inert, the stupid Tagalogs of Luzon and I, another Tagalog and another stupid man, we know very well who is that actor. . . Be careful, Most Excellent Sir, someone may sue for damages!

Abandon, Your Excellency, your intention of studying the bibliography of the Filipino theater, because I know what schoolteachers, what clerks have furnished you with the translation of some works. Be content, Your Excellency, with generalities for thus you will commit yourself less; do not go down to the bottom, lest what happened to Schiller’s diver befall you. He was saved the first time but the second time he was drowned. This time Your Excellency found a defender; who knows if you will have the same luck later. And now by way of farewell, I have to tell you why you have inspired me with so many sympathies and I have appointed myself your defender. Seeing that after you have twice occupied high posts in my country and knowing many of the things that you have done and attempted to do, I am delighted that my homeland, my race, the whole Philippine society, everything that I love and revere, only deserve the contempt of Your Excellency and inspire you with hatred and aversion. This time I speak sincerely, Most Excellent Sir. The greatest insult from Your Excellency is for my country an honor, because, in spite of how miserable, ignorant, and unfortunate she is, it seems that she still retains one good quality. God reward Your Excellency for the insults and contempt with which you honor the Philippines in general! Thunder, Your Excellency, slander, denigrate us, put us on the last step of the zoological ladder, nothing matters to us. Stir up the ire of everybody against the Filipinos who protest against such insults, against the grandchildren of those who have shed their blood for Spain, for her flag, to extend her dominions in the Orient, to preserve her colonial empire against the Chinese, Japanese, Mohammedans, Dutch, Portuguese, and English, to help even the countries who are friends of Spain; accuse us of being ingrates and filibusteros only because we have a sense of honor and because we want to protest against shielded outrages. It does not matter! We shall continue on our path. We shall remain faithful to Spain, while those who guide her destinies have a spark of love for our country, while she has ministers who plan liberal reforms, while the toll of invectives does not erase from our memory the names of Legazpi, Salcedo, Carriedo, and above all the names of the Catholic kings who protected from afar the unfortunate Malays of the Philippines!

RIZAL

03-408 [Reformists]